


watch the lights go wild

by featherx



Series: requests [34]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, M/M, no plot just summer loving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25609372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherx/pseuds/featherx
Summary: This may not be the way Linhardt had wanted to spend his summer, but it’s a step up from spending all day alone in the house with his father, too.Linhardt meets Byleth at a summer camp.
Relationships: Linhardt von Hevring/My Unit | Byleth
Series: requests [34]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1388335
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	watch the lights go wild

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saintcethlin (doyounqk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyounqk/gifts).



> prompt: byhardt summer camp AU. thats it  
> this ended up over double its intended length but what do you expect coming from me + byhardt  
> [do i even have to say where the title is from](https://open.spotify.com/track/46NGAvL695VnbcSeTmQWmM?si=ZqvJ1IMyTLWnzuwOOOA4WA)

The first thing the counselors do is direct them to the dining hall for lunch, then send them up to their rooms for, of all blessed things, naptime. Linhardt supposes this camp might not be the worst thing ever after all, even _if_ the air conditioning in their dorms are busted.

He manages to sleep through Caspar, who’s too excited to so much as sit down—by the time Linhardt wakes up again, Caspar’s already made friends with the other kids dorming with them. Linhardt can’t even tell them apart yet.

“Ashe says you can opt out of the activities with too much exercise, Lin,” Caspar says, when one of the counselors—Hapi, Linhardt thinks is her name—leads them back down to the building’s ground floor. For a summer camp, the place looks remarkably like a Catholic retreat house. “They get that not everyone’s got the same body and stuff! Isn’t that cool?”

“That _is_ a relief,” Linhardt sighs. “Just taking the stairs is already tiring enough. Hmm, I’m more interested in finding out when our next naptime is scheduled…”

“There are snack breaks between every activity, and bedtime’s at ten,” the gray-haired boy Caspar hasn’t stopped clinging to since they got on the bus together explains. Linhardt supposes this is Ashe. “If you’re really sleepy, they’ve always got coffee near the dining hall too!”

Linhardt makes a face. “Coffee… disgusting. Thank you anyway.” He can always take naps on the table while everyone else eats. That sounds nice to him.

Honestly, Linhardt hadn’t _wanted_ to go to summer camp—on his last summer vacation before university, too. Linhardt had kept himself going through those last few weeks of high school by thinking about all the hours he could spend doing nothing but napping and resting in his air-conditioned bedroom, maybe catching up on all the books on his reading list and studying some topics he’s actually interested in.

But, well, here he is. In summer camp. Who even goes to summer camp anymore? Linhardt hadn’t even been aware the things still existed until Caspar brought it up.

He sighs as they enter a room Hapi says will be their general assembly venue for the rest of their stay in here. It’s at least air-conditioned, so Linhardt tries to soak up as much of the coldness as he can until they have to step out into the sweltering heat once more.

This may not be the way he’d wanted to spend his summer, but it’s a step up from spending all day alone in the house with his father, too.

“You mean in _all_ the years you’ve been here, you’ve never explored at night!?” Caspar exclaims, scooting forward excitedly on his bed. He’d gotten the top bunk to Linhardt’s bottom, largely because Caspar liked climbing things like a monkey and Linhardt didn’t want to exert more effort than necessary getting to bed.

Ashe, on the top bunk right next to Caspar, shakes his head with a shiver. “W-Why would I? We’re not even allowed to leave after lights out.”

“ _No_ way.” Caspar bends down to make eye contact with Linhardt underneath him, which is an exceptionally difficult feat, considering Linhardt has already begun to close his own eyes. “Lin, did you hear that? Don’t you wanna go exploring?”

“No,” Linhardt grumbles. He knew this would happen, he _knew_ it, but he had certainly tried his best to hope it wouldn’t happen anyway. So much for that.

“You guys are _boring._ Do I have to go out there myself?” Caspar’s already swinging down from the top and fishing the flashlight Linhardt had discouraged him from bringing out of his bag.

“Ah! C-Caspar, wait!” As expected, Ashe hurries down his own bed and follows Caspar to the doorway before shooting a glance behind him. “Linhardt, aren’t you coming with?”

Linhardt briefly considers just staying there and sleeping, like he had been looking forward to all day, but this moment of contemplation is mostly out of courtesy by this point. He’s already getting up and unplugging his phone from the charger. “Fine,” he relents. “Just in case you two need to get something off the top shelf or whatever.”

It’s late enough that the hallways and corridors are completely deserted, which means even the camp staff have retired for the night. Caspar uses his flashlight, Linhardt uses the flashlight on his phone—this is exactly why Linhardt had tried to tell Caspar an actual flashlight would be useless, but had he listened, of course not—and Ashe apparently has impeccable night vision. They’d somehow all had the foresight to wear sensible sneakers, which makes Linhardt wonder if they had all done this before at some point.

Unfortunately, the hallway their dorms are located in is completely devoid of windows, which really just makes everything that much darker and creepier. Caspar is his usual indomitable self, but Ashe jumps at every little noise and clings to Caspar’s arm so tightly that Linhardt worries for his best friend’s blood circulation… particularly because Linhardt is holding on to his other arm. “You two,” Caspar chides— _chides,_ this is the only time Linhardt will let Caspar chide him—“there’s nothing to be scared of! It’s just one long corridor.”

“Yeah, without windows or any other convenient escape routes,” Ashe mumbles, bright green eyes darting from side to side. With his fluffy gray hair, his resemblance to a small rabbit is uncanny. “This place is great, but it’s super freaky at night. My older brother went here a few times when he was younger, and the only thing he remembers about it is this hallway because of how dark it always is…”

“I’m not scared anyway,” Linhardt mutters, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on what he can see before him with their combined lights. “You’re right. There’s nothing to be scared of. I’m just holding on to you so we don’t get lost, that’s all…”

Caspar actually rolls his eyes at him. “Are there any places we could go? This building’s a lot bigger than I thought!”

“Weren’t you the one who looked this up in their website—”

Ashe clears his throat. “There’s a roofdeck up on the fifth floor,” he says. “We haven’t been allowed there ever since someone threw fruits at Seteth’s head from up there, and the gate’s usually locked, but…” He retrieves a hairpin from his pocket and grins sheepishly. “If you want, we could see if I can get it open?”

“Ashe,” Caspar says, “you are officially the best person on the planet. Okay, to the roofdeck! Uh, but can you lead the way?”

They had mostly stuck to the ground floor for today, so Linhardt is only really familiar with the dining hall and the assembly room, but Ashe is clearly used to the building layout (even if he sticks by Caspar’s side the entire time). The staircase leading up is long and winding, but thankfully the walls are glass once they emerge out of the dorm corridors, and Linhardt silently admires how bright the moon is when far away from the city lights. He can’t hear anything from outside, but as he looks down at the garden outside the building, he thinks he can feel the leaves rustling on the trees, crickets chirping, frogs croaking.

Father had neglected the garden at their estate, Linhardt thinks. Mother is dead, and they don’t have a gardener, so all the plants she had tended to so carefully had wilted in the days following her death. Perhaps Linhardt could have done something, could have picked up a watering can or used some fertilizer, but at the time he couldn’t so much as look outside his bedroom window, much less get out and do anything worthwhile.

A sudden sound jerks Linhardt out of his thoughts—it was too far away and distant to pick anything out, but it had sounded rather like a crash of sorts. “What was that?” Ashe squeaks.

Caspar looks more excited than ever. “It came from further in there,” he whispers, pointing at the hallway leading deeper into the third floor. He switches off his flashlight, leaving only Linhardt’s phone for visibility, and grins. “Come on, let’s go check it out!”

“No, no, we’re supposed to run _away_ from the weird sounds,” Linhardt hisses, grabbing Caspar’s arm, the light shaking where he holds his phone up. But for all Linhardt’s height, Caspar is still infinitely stronger than him, and it takes almost zero effort for the guy to pull both him and a terrified-looking Ashe along.

They creep along the sides of the corridor, Linhardt trying his very best not to turn tail and run off by himself like every idiotic victim in a B-grade horror movie. There doesn’t seem to be anything out of place, but with only Linhardt’s phone for light, it’s not like they’d be able to spot anything actually out of place that’s more than two feet in front of them. “What do you think that was?” Caspar asks. “It sounded kinda like something crashing, right?”

“D-D-Do you think someone broke a window?” Ashe manages, his voice several pitches higher than Linhardt remembers it being.

“I doubt it,” Linhardt says, somehow keeping his own voice steady and not trembling at all. “It would probably have been louder… and more like a shattering sort of noise. This one might have been something falling…”

 _Like a body,_ he decides against adding.

This just makes Caspar even giddier. “I can’t believe it. A real mystery! And it’s only our first day! Is summer camp always this exciting?”

“Even though my heart’s beating really fast, I don’t think this is what I would call ‘exciting,’” Ashe sighs.

Linhardt’s phone chooses that moment to flicker dangerously, and he only has enough time to open it and check the battery—which is at a lovely one percent—before it dies on him, along with the light, leaving the three of them in pitch-black darkness. Caspar yelps in surprise, while Linhardt hears Ashe let out a horrified, “N-No!”

“Oh, uh,” Linhardt says, staring blankly down at nothing, “it… it didn’t finish charging earlier.”

The sound chooses that moment to ring out again.

This time, it’s much closer than before—it sounds like a metallic _clang_ that reminds Linhardt of rattling tin cans or cage bars, and the mental image of some sort of cage in this place is enough to send his heart rate spiking dangerously. “We—We should go,” he manages, mouth almost too dry to speak. “Caspar, come on.”

To Linhardt’s relief, there’s only a short pause before he sees movement in the darkness, quick and short enough to look like Caspar nodding. “Okay. We’ll go again next time though, won’t we?”

“Let’s just hurry,” Ashe whispers, sounding panicked. “Whatever that was might’ve been someone from the staff or… or something else entirely… e-either way, it’s bad if they see us, so—”

_Clang._

It’s so near, it could be just around the corner. Ashe tugs on Caspar’s wrist and takes off at a run, while Caspar grabs onto Linhardt—but they’re too damn _fast,_ and Linhardt can’t see a thing in front of him unlike Ashe, damn him and his perfect eyesight, that Linhardt ends up bumping face-first into a wall instead of following Caspar to turn or something. “C—Caspar,” he manages, groaning when his nose stings in pain, “wait—hold on, where—?”

He can hear heavy footfalls thumping down his left, so Linhardt feels across the wall until he can turn left—but then those footfalls fade as if too far in the distance to hear already, and are replaced by… by footsteps, too, but these are an entirely different set, coming from behind Linhardt and only getting closer.

Linhardt feels himself freeze up, limbs locking in place and feet glued to the floor. Who is that? Rather, _what_ is that? It can’t be Caspar or Ashe—they would have called Linhardt’s name already, or made themselves known some other way. Besides, they had just disappeared from hearing, and probably gone down the stairs back to the dorms by how fast they’d been running. Linhardt can’t even blame them for leaving him here, whether accidental or intentional, because… because…

 _You’ll never get anywhere if you keep lazing about and doing nothing,_ Father’s voice echoes, as clear as that rainy day Linhardt had first heard it on. _What’s the point? You’re worthless. I never did understand what your mother saw in you._

That last sentence had been quiet, muttered in an undertone, but Linhardt had picked them out through the rain battering the roof anyway. Had Father meant for him to hear them? Were they meant to serve as some sort of motivation to get off the bed and earn his worth?

The footsteps are growing closer, closer. Linhardt slumps against the wall, suddenly much colder than he had been a minute ago. Maybe in the darkness, whoever— _whatever_ —that is can’t see him, but that’s an empty hope at best…

Closer… Linhardt screws his eyes shut, but he can’t do anything to steady his too-fast breathing. _Closer…_

“Umm,” a voice, low and soft, calls, “are you… okay?”

 _Perhaps it’s an angel,_ Linhardt tells himself. _Perhaps I’ve already died and I’m being welcomed to—hold on, why would I be going to Heaven? I don’t even believe in it._ It’s that thought that has him opening his eyes a crack, only to still see nothing but darkness before him.

Another footstep—but this one is so close, almost right in front of him, that Linhardt lets out an embarrassing yelp and jumps what feels like a foot in the air. “D-D-Don’t come any closer,” he stammers, not proud of how panicked he sounds but unable to do much about it. “I… I… I have a weapon. You’ll… You’ll regret… getting near me.”

A long pause. “You’re empty-handed,” the voice, distinctly human-sounding, eventually points out. “Are you lost? You’re not supposed to be out at this time.”

Fabric rustles, and before Linhardt can decide between staying or escaping, the familiar light of a phone flashlight blinks to life. Linhardt takes a step back in surprise, although there isn’t much room to step back in considering he’s already against the wall—standing before him is a boy who looks more or less around his age, with short, uneven dark blue hair and even darker, even bluer eyes. He looks politely confused, head tilted just slightly to the side. “You look familiar,” the boy says. “Are you a new camper?”

“Th… Uh… Yes,” Linhardt manages. “You’re…?”

“Ah… you can call me one of the counselors,” the boy says. His answer is exceptionally vague, as if he himself doesn’t know who he is. “I’m Byleth. If you were looking for the dorms, they’re downstairs. Do you want me to go with you?”

“I wasn’t…” Linhardt trails off. If this Byleth really _is_ one of the counselors, it’d probably be better if he think Linhardt had just gotten lost on the way to the restroom or something, else Linhardt might get in trouble for going out… even if that isn’t _really_ his fault, it was Caspar’s, the rascal. So he nods, trying to school his expression into neutrality. “Yes, please, that’d be nice. I’m Linhardt, by the way.”

“Linhardt,” Byleth mumbles to himself. “That’s a strange name.”

“So is _Byleth,_ ” Linhardt returns.

Byleth… well, he doesn’t _smile,_ per se, but he does blink slowly and the corner of his lips curves upwards as if in an _attempt_ at a smile, so Linhardt supposes that counts. “Guess you’re right,” he says. Then he starts walking down the left hallway, looking over his shoulder at Linhardt. “Come on. The rooms aren’t far from here.”

They don’t speak for the rest of the walk down the stairs and through the long, window-less hallway again until they’re standing outside the boys’ dorms. “Well, er,” Linhardt starts, unsure where to proceed from there, “thanks for this. It’s my first time here, so I don’t… know the way around just yet.”

Byleth shrugs. “It’s no problem. Just don’t make it a habit—I’m not up late all the time.” He taps at his phone, and the light goes off, leaving them in darkness again; still, Linhardt thinks he can make out the deep blue of Byleth’s eyes in the night.

Should he say something else? Just a thank-you seems insincere after Byleth had gone through the trouble. But before Linhardt can think on it any longer, Byleth’s already saying, “Goodnight,” and then his light, barely-audible footsteps fade further down the corridor.

Linhardt stares into the bleak blackness for a little longer before he heads back inside the dorms.

Predictably enough, Caspar and Ashe are still awake—in fact, Linhardt walks in on the two of them silently shouting and pushing at each other, only for them to halt in place as soon as they lay eyes on Linhardt. Caspar nearly shoves Linhardt to the floor in a tackle. “Where were you!?” he whisper-shouts. “I’m so sorry, Lin! I-I thought you were right behind me, but then you weren’t, and then we just couldn’t see you anymore—”

“I’m fine,” Linhardt interrupts, gently pushing him away lest Caspar squeeze the air out of his lungs. “A counselor brought me back. But this should teach you—” He jabs Caspar’s forehead, and Caspar makes a noise of complaint that sounds like _weh,_ “not to drag me around in complete darkness ever again. At least explore during the _day._ ”

“Oww…” Caspar pouts. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, Lin. Daytime explorations only from now on.”

Linhardt would have preferred it if there were no explorations, period, but he can only control Caspar so far. Next to them, Ashe hovers uncertainly for a moment before blurting out, “B-But what was that noise from earlier, then?”

“Oh.” Linhardt frowns—after the relief from being found not by a vengeful ghost but by a nice counselor, actually, he had completely forgotten about the noises. “I didn’t ask,” he says, “but I’m sure it was just the counselor doing errands or something. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Both Caspar and Ashe look rather unconvinced, but Linhardt doesn’t give them the chance to pester him further about it—he kicks off his shoes and flops lifelessly onto his bed, eternally glad he has the bottom bunk, and buries his face in the pillow. “It’s late,” he tells them, his voice muffled but hopefully understandable. “Go to sleep before you wake anyone up.”

More whispering, but finally Caspar clambers up to his bed and Ashe scales the stairs up to his own. But Linhardt, despite all his exhaustion, doesn’t fall asleep immediately—he stares at the bedsheets for a while, idly running through everything that had happened once more in his head. _Byleth…_ Linhardt knows he’s not much for names nor faces, but he’s sure he would have remembered seeing Byleth at the activities throughout the day. A pretty face like that is hard to miss, after all, even if some of the other counselors—Yuri, for instance—are just as easy on the eyes.

_Linhardt. That’s a strange name._

Linhardt tugs the blankets up to his chin. _So is Byleth._

There’s something _interesting_ about Byleth, the same sort of interesting that makes Linhardt’s hands itch to grab a book and flip its pages, makes Linhardt’s head spin with theories and hypotheses and questions about who-what-where-when-why. Does Byleth have deep, dark secrets? Did he have a reason for being up late tonight? Linhardt recognizes this, the familiar hunger for knowledge and thirst for discovery.

There’s something interesting about Byleth, something lying in wait for Linhardt to unearth and learn more about—and Linhardt’s never been one to ignore the call for research.

Maybe this summer break won’t be so bad after all.

For a counselor, Byleth sure is hard to find.

Linhardt sees him exactly three more times throughout the next few weeks: twice talking to the other counselors, and once refilling his water bottle. The latter would have been the perfect time to corner him into a proper conversation, which Linhardt had been mentally preparing himself for if only because talking can be _so_ much effort, but Byleth’s already left by the time Linhardt had thought of speaking with him.

“Does he not _want_ to be found?” Linhardt mutters, staring at the tablecloth pattern. Across him, Caspar tears into his chicken leg, and Ashe settles into the seat beside him with his own dinner plate. “He is making this terribly difficult for me.”

“Who is?” Ashe asks.

“Byleth. The counselor from that night.” Linhardt props his chin up on the edge of his palm. “Did I never mention his name? Anyway, I haven’t been able to get him alone since then. It’s like he’s avoiding me.”

Ashe stares at him for a moment, looking dumbstruck, before promptly bursting into giggles. “Byleth? You mean the brother, right?”

“The… brother?”

“He’s not _really_ a counselor,” Ashe says, which doesn’t exactly surprise Linhardt. “He’s the kid of one of the camp staff—Mr. Jeralt—so he has to stay here with his dad and sister every summer, but he doesn’t actually work here. He’s sort of just, like… a jack-of-all-trades handyman around camp. Apparently he’s been here since he was a kid.”

Linhardt blinks. “Oh.” Well, that at least explains Byleth had looked too young—by that, Linhardt means his age—to be a counselor: he isn’t one. Also, he has a sister? Yet another question to ask whenever Linhardt gets the chance.

Ashe’s smile fades, replaced with confusion. “He’s the one who helped you that night? That’s weird. It’s not like he’d be assigned to patrol the hallways or something.”

“Maybe,” Caspar pipes up through a mouthful of chicken, “he was sneaking away to do something in secret! Could it be training regimens he can’t let anyone else know about? Is he super jacked, Lin?”

“Why would you ask me that.”

“Well, ‘cause you always notice?”

Linhardt clears his throat very loudly before Ashe can laugh any harder. “ _I_ think he may have some secrets, that’s for certain. He’s interesting. I want to see what I can find about him.”

Ashe looks amused. “Really? That’s why you want to get him alone?”

“I will thank you not to question me. Also,” Linhardt adds, just to distract the two of them from sharing knowing grins at each other, “he might know something about the weird sound we heard, don’t you think? I didn’t hear it again after he found me.”

“Weird sound?” someone else says—Linhardt looks up to find their counselor, Hapi, taking a seat beside them. Her plate is filled with a bit of everything from the buffet table, which means the barbecue stick balanced on top of the mountain of rice is dangerously close to tipping over. “What’d you hear?”

“Uhh.” The three of them exchange looks— _what do we tell her, how did we hear it, what’s our cover story_ —before Ashe says, “We went out to the restroom at night, and then we heard something like… like a clang, I think?”

Hapi frowns. “A clang… that reminds me of something that happened before…”

“What’s this? A story?” Ashe scoots closer, eyes sparkling. Right—Linhardt would have to be blind to see how late Ashe stays up at night reading ebooks on his phone.

“Yeah. It’s not great for publicity, so I don’t go around spreadin’ it too much, but…” Hapi gives them a sideways glance, looking thoughtful. “Well, it’s your last year anyway, so it shouldn’t hurt. You sure you wanna hear it?”

“Yeah!” Caspar exclaims, shifting forward as well. Even Linhardt can’t deny the curiosity stirring in him—what sort of story is bad for a summer camp’s publicity?

“Okay, kids, gather ‘round,” Hapi says, rolling her eyes when Caspar and Ashe obediently move closer. “A few years back, I was campers with Yuri, Balthus, and Constance—the other counselors, yeah? During naptime one day, I fell right asleep soon as I hit the bed and had this real trippy dream, where I was walking up the stairs in this building. But the stairs just kept going on and on, even after I reached five floors.”

 _Five floors…_ if Linhardt remembers correctly, Ashe had said the off-limits roofdeck is on the fifth floor.

“Anyway, I woke up in the middle of climbing those stairs ‘cause we had to go,” Hapi says, sounding disgruntled even several years after her nap had been interrupted. “But later that night, I had the same dream.”

“The same dream?” Ashe squeaks out, already clinging to Caspar’s arm. “You mean, like, it continued?”

“Still climbing the stupid stairs,” Hapi confirms. “At the same time, Yuri-bird, B, and Coco thought it’d be a great idea to explore the building after lights-out when the camp staff weren’t breathin’ down their necks. I wanted to, but, like, I was sleepy, so I passed. Plus they needed someone to open the door for them when they came back, I guess.”

Once again, the three of them all look at each other. Linhardt is fairly sure they’re all thinking the same thing: _why didn’t we get someone to open the door for us?_

“In my dream,” Hapi says, the crooked smile on her face telling them she figured them out, “I finally reached the roofdeck… or the gate to the roofdeck, anyway. You guys know what it looks like? It’s real old and rusted, and pretty much no one goes up there anyway, so the staff haven’t bothered repairing it or getting a new door. And keep this a secret, but the lock doesn’t even work—you sorta just need to slide it a little, and boom, thing’s open.”

Ashe nods, like he’s carefully filing this piece of information away.

“When dream-me opened it, though, it wasn’t the roofdeck.” Hapi lowers her voice. “It looked an awful lot like a torture chamber.”

“A _what?_ ” Caspar yelps.

Hapi shushes him, and continues. “Full of old medieval weapons and all, like a guillotine and chains and everything, and _lots_ of blood. Creepy, right? But it wasn’t empty. In the middle of the room was a big metal cage. And inside was this old man, bald and wrinkled and with only, like, one working eye—and he kept shaking the cage bars, trying to get out…”

_A metallic clang that reminds Linhardt of rattling tin cans or cage bars…_

“Then I woke up,” Hapi cheerfully finishes. Ashe sighs in relief, like he’s the one who had been dreaming. “But I’m not done yet. A few minutes later, Yuri-bird and company came rushing into the room, said they were scared out of their wits because they heard something like a clang while walking around.”

Linhardt’s heart drops to his stomach. “C-Could…” He clears his throat and tries again. “Could there have been construction work nearby?”

“Uh-uh. We’re in the middle of the woods, if you haven’t noticed. Where would any construction work be?” Hapi grins wickedly. “Believe this or not, it’s up to you. But if anything happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you. See you tomorrow, then.”

She stands up and brings her plate over to the table for counselors, sitting on the chair next to Constance.

“No,” Linhardt says, immediately.

“Lin!” Caspar whines. “You can’t just expect me to sit still after hearing that! We should at least ask, I dunno, Ferdinand or Claude if they dreamt of anything. Or Hubert! You know, if anyone would dream about an old man in a cage, it’d be that guy. I heard him mumbling something that sounded like a curse the other day.”

Ashe shakes his head. “He was probably just trying to curse his dad again.” Then he frowns. “Wait, you’re right. If anyone dreamt about an old man in a cage, it _would_ be him.”

“ _And_ she mentioned the roofdeck,” Caspar adds, much to Linhardt’s consternation. He had been dearly hoping Caspar had missed that detail somehow. “What if there’s a deeper, darker reason it’s off-limits up there? We gotta find out! It’ll be an adventure!”

“Do you _want_ to be possessed?” Linhardt returns.

Caspar wilts. “I’ll bring salt or something. And I can borrow a rosary from Marianne?”

Linhardt sighs and massages his temple. He doesn’t _want_ Caspar and Ashe to go out again, mostly out of concern they’ll make a ruckus and actually get possessed by whatever metal clanging ghost is lurking in the hallways, but he can’t deny he’s definitely more curious than ever now about what Byleth had been doing so late at night. “Tomorrow,” he finally decides. “Weather forecast said it would rain tonight.”

Caspar grins. “Okay! I’ll charge the flashlight too! Ashe, what about you? Bet you don’t need that lockpick anymore, huh?”

“C-Caspar, keep it down! Someone’s going to think we’re robbing the place!”

As predicted, it does rain that night, which helps muffle Linhardt’s movements when he slips out of bed, toes on his sneakers, and sneaks out the dorms. This time, his phone is fully charged and he brought a power bank along, so there’s no fear of running out of battery again—unfortunately, the rain clouds mean he can’t get any help from the moonlight this time, so if something does happen, he’s on his own. Literally.

Linhardt picks his way through the long, window-less corridor, heads up the winding stairs to the third floor, and follows the faint echo of the clanging metal sounds once more. Tonight is the first night he’s hearing them again, after several unsuccessful attempts, which might mean Byleth’s somewhere around here as well. Linhardt just has to look for him.

He follows the sounds for a few more minutes until they suddenly stop—but it’s fine, because Linhardt had managed to get all the way to the room they seem to be coming from. It’s generic and nondescript, with its only distinguishing factor being devoid of a door plate labeling its function like the rest of the rooms in the building. A storage room, perhaps, with loads of stuff made out of metal… but that explanation is so mind-numbingly boring that Linhardt refuses to believe that can be it.

Taking a deep breath, he reaches out and turns the doorknob. It isn’t locked, and Linhardt makes out a faint light when he pushes it open a crack—he turns off his phone and peers inside…

Or he _would_ have, if something doesn’t suddenly slam him against the wall, pinning his wrists above him. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” a voice hisses.

Linhardt, too terrified to respond right away, can only stare blankly at the darkness. Lightning flashes outside the window beside them, revealing, for the shortest of seconds, a familiar face and dark blue hair. “B… Byleth?” he manages.

A pause. “You’re the one from before… Linhardt.”

Linhardt swallows; the pounding of the rain against the windows is starting to sync with the rapid beat of his heart. Byleth is so close that Linhardt can feel his breath on his skin when he speaks. “Yes. I… I heard something… from here.”

“You’re not allowed in that room.”

“It wasn’t locked. I—”

“You’re not allowed in that room,” Byleth repeats. His words are hard, but Linhardt can detect the slightest bit of a waver in his voice. Is he scared? He should be—this looks an awful lot like Linhardt had been a door away from finding out some sort of deep, dark secret like he’d been expecting. “Please don’t concern yourself with it.”

“What are you hiding?” Linhardt whispers back, feeling his confidence growing the more he notices about Byleth—how his hands tremble where he holds Linhardt’s wrists against the wall, how his breaths are coming quick and shallow in obvious fear. “You’re only making me more curious now, you know.”

Byleth inhales and exhales, clearly trying to get his breathing under control. “Please,” he says again, but this time the way he sounds sends a shiver down Linhardt’s spine.

“F—Fine, alright,” Linhardt agrees. Now _he’s_ the one who can’t think straight—he dearly wishes he hadn’t turned his phone flashlight off, if only because he has the sudden, urgent need to see Byleth’s face right now, however he may look. “On one condition.”

“Anything,” Byleth says, so quickly it’s somewhat surprising.

“Talk to me.”

“Done,” Byleth says, even quicker. A second later he frowns in confusion, which is how Linhardt knows he hadn’t bothered to process Linhardt’s words first before actually agreeing. “Wait… not that it’s a problem, but… what?”

“You’re interesting,” Linhardt says. Byleth’s grip on his wrists has loosened enough by now that he can slip out of his hold and gently push Byleth away, just enough that Linhardt can breathe without feeling like their chests will touch. “If you won’t tell me what secret is behind that door, then you can tell me something else. Right?”

Byleth takes a step back. “I… guess,” he says, sounding bewildered. “Um… you promise you won’t go in if I… talk to you?”

“Mm.”

“Well. Err. Okay, then.” Byleth takes another step back, and another, and another, until he’s standing in front of the room. He pulls the ajar door closed behind him, still frowning when he looks at Linhardt. “You’re not supposed to be out here,” he says. “I thought I told you not to make this a habit…”

Linhardt shrugs. “What can I say? You were so suspicious that night that I simply had to poke around for myself. Besides, if you’re not a counselor, then you certainly shouldn’t be here either.”

“That’s true.” Byleth scratches his cheek. “Fine, I’ll talk to you… tomorrow, then?”

“You’ll finally be around during activities? You have to be. Half of them are too physically strenuous for me, so I’m stuck in the room just staring out the window.”

Even in the darkness, Linhardt manages to pick out the hint of a smile on Byleth’s face—that same, tiny upwards curve of his lips that Linhardt remembers from last time. “Okay. I’ll keep you company then. For tonight, you should get some sleep.”

“Then we have an agreement. Go on and continue with your super-secret work in that room.”

“I-It isn’t—”

“Goodnight,” Linhardt says, turning around just so he can grin in victory to himself without Byleth seeing.

His adventure for tonight a success, he hurries through the corridors and down the stairs, then creeps back into the dorms and in his bed without waking anyone up. Only when Linhardt is back under the covers does he let out a little sigh in relief—normally he’d be a little worried that Byleth would forget about this in the morning, but whatever secret lies behind that door makes Linhardt think it’s too big for Byleth to _not_ uphold his end of the deal.

Still, Linhardt wonders what exactly he’s hiding. The sounds had stopped right as Linhardt reached the room, so perhaps Byleth had been standing guard somewhere outside… but what exactly are those sounds? Could it be something like blacksmithing? Perhaps he’s making a weapon… Linhardt briefly entertains the idea of an old man in a cage, but decides even that is too preposterous to actually think possible.

What Linhardt thinks might stick with him the longest, though, is how Byleth had felt so close to him. His breath on his face, his hands pinning Linhardt’s wrists to the wall, his voice wavering ever so slightly when he’d said _please…_

 _No, no, no._ Linhardt tugs the blankets over his head and closes his eyes firmly shut.

Linhardt doesn’t recognize Byleth at first, mostly because Linhardt’s doing his utter best to stay as still, quiet, and unnoticeable as he can in some bushes. He thinks Byleth stands in front of him for maybe five entire minutes until Byleth finally says, “Linhardt?”

“You didn’t scare me,” Linhardt immediately says, before actually looking up at Byleth’s face and going, “Oh.”

“Is this that hide-to-scare game?” Byleth crouches down until he’s eye-level with Linhardt. “You’ve got twigs in your hair.”

“Shut up and hide.”

Byleth shuts up and hides. He shuffles to sit next to Linhardt, though his blue hair doesn’t help camouflage himself among the plants as well as Linhardt’s does. “Shouldn’t you be going out and scaring the other teams for points?” he asks, reaching up to pick the aforementioned twigs out of Linhardt’s head.

Linhardt folds his arms over his chest. “And exert more effort than necessary? No, thank you. Besides, Claude from the yellow team is apparently a master at this game, and I’d rather not get stuck in his pitfall traps, so I’ll stay nice and safe right where I am.”

He hadn’t listened much when Balthus had explained the mechanics of the game, but it’s simple enough that Linhardt understood right away—the campers are divided into their three teams (named, predictably enough, after the primary colors) and are given time to scatter and spread out around the camp building’s surrounding area, and they have to run around and scare campers from other teams to get points. It’s really just a messed-up version of hide-and-seek, as far as Linhardt can tell.

“But just sitting here seems boring.” Byleth rests his chin atop his knees. “Why stay out here at all if you’ll just do this?”

Linhardt shrugs. “Then I’d have to stay inside the building with Constance, and talking to her gets old after a while.” There are just some personalities he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to mix well with, and Constance’s is definitely one of them, even if she doesn’t seem like a bad person.

Byleth hums in what sounds like understanding, then falls silent. Birdsong echoes around them, leaves rustle in the treetops, and wind whistles in their ears.

“So,” Linhardt says, “this looks like a great time to make well on that deal we have, hm?”

Byleth winces. “I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”

“You’re here now, and you’re not usually even around during activities. You were definitely looking for me, weren’t you?” Linhardt smiles, resisting the urge to full-out grin when Byleth’s gaze slides away from him in obvious embarrassment. “Whatever. Come on, tell me something interesting.”

“Umm… what do you want to know?”

Linhardt mulls a variety of questions over for a moment. “How old are you?” he eventually decides.

“That’s pretty… simple,” Byleth remarks, although his tone of voice sounds like he meant to say ‘boring.’ “I’m 17 this year. If I were you, it’d be my last year here too.”

So Linhardt was right—they _are_ the same age. “Okay. Hmm… any places you could theoretically go exploring in around here?”

Byleth looks much more comfortable answering this question. “Maybe. Do you want to go look?”

Linhardt looks down at his watch—they’ve still got half an hour before the game ends. Plenty of time to poke his nose into places he probably shouldn’t. “Better than just sitting here and waiting for someone to scare me. Let’s go.”

Byleth leads him through the woods for a few minutes, rattling off random facts about the trees and plants they come across; most of the information goes in one of Linhardt’s ear and falls out the other, but he does his best to look like he’s listening intently anyway, because Byleth, usually so quiet and composed—from what little Linhardt’s observed of him, anyway—suddenly talking a mile a minute is more than a bit endearing. “And these white spots,” Byleth says, nearly dragging Linhardt over to a nearby tree, “they’re lichens. There’re all sorts of different kinds, but this one means the air around here is clean.”

“Is it? That’s nice to know.” Linhardt supposes he hasn’t been having as many asthma attacks as usual. Or shortness of breath. Or any breathing-related problems in general. “You know a lot about the woods,” he observes, grudgingly lengthening his strides to keep up with Byleth’s shorter-but-faster pace.

Byleth scratches his cheek in what looks like an adorable nervous habit. “I used to not have much to do as a kid here. So I’d just… go out and explore sometimes. I think there are nature spirits in the woods too.”

 _That_ came out of nowhere. “Nature spirits?”

“I got lost really often before. If it was late at night and Dad hadn’t found me yet, foxes or birds would lead me back to the camp.” Byleth smiles, a tiny crooked thing. “Tiny flashing lights, once. Sounds like spirits, right?”

“A-Are you sure that… that wasn’t…” Linhardt can’t even say the word.

Byleth tilts his head. “What? Ghosts?” Now he just looks even more amused. “I didn’t think you’d be scared of—”

“I-I’m not scared! Who says I’m scared?” Linhardt snaps, crossing his arms. Byleth, for his part, doesn’t look at all convinced. “ _I’m_ just wary. What sort of person doesn’t freak out at least a _little_ bit when faced with tiny flashing lights? In fact, what sort of person _follows_ those lights?”

Byleth shrugs. “I’ve been in here long enough. The woods don’t hurt people who don’t harm them. That’s why you should be careful too, Linhardt.”

Even after a while, Linhardt still isn’t used to hearing his name in Byleth’s voice. It’s not like Linhardt’s ever been fond of his name—it’s certainly a bother having to correct everyone who pronounces it wrong the first time around—but Byleth almost makes him like that part of himself. “Careful? What, should I avoid stepping on twigs or something?”

“No, not like that.” Byleth smiles. “You’ve heard stories before, right? Of kids getting lost in the woods forever?”

“ _What?_ ”

“Oh, look, here we are.” Byleth halts in his steps, and Linhardt skids to a stop next to him—after hearing all his strange, cryptic, probably intentionally-vague words, there’s absolutely no way Linhardt wants to be walking when Byleth isn’t. “This lake leads to a waterfall near some cliffs over there, since we’re a bit high up. Did you notice we were hiking upwards?”

“Um, yes,” Linhardt lies. Usually he runs out of breath and has to take a break after walking for more than five minutes, but he has to admit Byleth had distracted him well with the conversation enough to get Linhardt’s heart beating quickly for a completely different reason. “A lake, huh. I guess all self-respecting woods have lakes and waterfalls.”

Byleth clears a spot by the riverbank of gravel and plops down, already pulling off his shoes. After a moment’s hesitation, mostly because they have to do their own laundry here and Linhardt’s knowledge of such only extends as far as knowing how to operate the washing machine, Linhardt relents and sits down next to him. “It’s nice here, right?” Byleth sighs, dipping his feet in the water. “I’m sure other campers know about this place, but you’re not usually allowed to go this far out in the woods anyway, so I’m almost always alone in here.”

Linhardt blinks at him. “But you brought me here. Now what? I might bring Caspar and Ashe here with me sometime, and then your peaceful place will be… well, not very peaceful at all.”

“Hmm.” Byleth looks at him, the expression on his face perfectly indiscernible. “But you won’t, will you?”

Maybe it’s the afternoon sunshine sparkling on the lake surface, or maybe it’s the breeze blowing through Linhardt’s hair and rustling the leaves of trees, or maybe it’s nothing at all, just the beat of his heart echoing in his ears. Whatever it is, Linhardt can’t bring himself to look at Byleth for too long, else his heart begin pounding for yet another different reason he’d really rather not name.

“No,” he says, at length. The lake water is pleasantly cool on his sore feet. “I suppose not.”

Byleth smiles much more easily than Linhardt first assumed. “See? I trust you. Besides, this is your last year for the age cut-off, so it’s not like you’ll be coming back here again.”

“Hmph. Nothing’s stopping me from returning as a counselor, you know.”

“Somehow I find that hard to believe,” Byleth murmurs, more to himself than anything. “Anyway, there are fish in the lake too. This is where Dad taught me how to fish, actually. Next time you’re free, I’ll bring my fishing gear. I think you’d like fishing. Do you?”

“I… Fish are nice,” Linhardt weakly agrees. His only experiences with fish are when they’re dead and on his dinner plate, though he’s always wanted to go to an aquarium.

Byleth actually _beams._ It almost looks strange on his face. “Okay. It’s settled, then.”

“It is?”

“You don’t want to?”

“No, I—of course I do,” Linhardt hurries to say. He likes it when Byleth smiles, which might be why it makes his chest tighten in pain when Byleth looks disappointed and let down. “I don’t think I have the arm strength required to pull up fish, though. And I hate touching insects, so I wouldn’t be able to put the worms as bait on the hook or whatever…”

Byleth’s blue eyes sparkle like the ripples on the lake. “Don’t worry about any of that. I’ll get you something for it next time.”

“Oh, hm. You will?” Linhardt’s never been one to turn down a gift. “Alright. I’ll look forward to it, then. I’m sure there’ll be more games that take place in the woods, so you can kidnap me and bring me here again.”

Hiking back down takes a good ten minutes, so Linhardt only has time to wash the sweat off his face before they have to return. But in their hurry, Linhardt topples right into one of the things he had sworn not to fall for—and, in his desperate panic, drags Byleth down with him into the pitfall trap. “You have _got_ to be kidding me,” Linhardt groans, wiping mud off his face.

Footsteps sound up ahead—or up above, as it may—before Claude’s head, complete with obnoxious grin, peers down at them. “So you were here all along, Linhardt?” he laughs. “I totally surprised you, didn’t I? Hah! That’s a point for the yellow team! We win the draw—” He cuts himself off with a yelp when Byleth rises from the ground, shaking twigs and leaves every which way like a wet dog. “What the? Is that… Byleth?”

Linhardt grins, unable to keep it off his face. “You look rather surprised up there, Claude. Don’t I get a point?” He helps Byleth to his feet—the trap isn’t deep enough for the fall to have injured either of them beyond a sore back, thankfully enough, but Linhardt asks, “You alright?” anyway.

Byleth blinks, still looking disoriented, before nodding and looking up at Claude. “You,” he says, like he’s found the cat that knocked over his onions.

Claude lets out a nervous little laugh. “D-Damn, what were you two doing together so far out in the woods, huh? Something your dad should know about, Byleth?”

“Claude! Did you find him?” There’s barely any time to recognize the familiar voice before Ashe is peeking over the edge as well next to a grinning Claude, before his eyes widen to the size of saucers and he nearly falls over if Claude doesn’t catch him by the back of his collar. “L-L-L-Linhardt! And B-Byleth! What are you two doing… together…”

Byleth looks confused. “We were—”

“That’s right,” Linhardt confirms, to Ashe’s growing horror. “It’s exactly what you’re thinking of.”

Ashe lets out a scandalized little squeak and flees the scene with admirable speed. Claude squints down at Linhardt. “You’re a total sneak,” he huffs. “Is that two points now?”

“Three. I surprised you once and Ashe twice.”

Someone else comes running, judging by the thudding footfalls above. “I… I heard that!” Edelgard, the leader of Linhardt’s team, shouts as she skids to a stop right at the edge of the pit. “Don’t think you can… huff… lie your way out of this one, Claude… gah…”

“Okay, okay, red team won, _whaaat_ ever,” Claude says, crossing his arms with a little pout.

After helping Linhardt and Byleth out of the trap, they head the rest of the way back to camp picking leaves and dirt out of each other’s hair—Byleth has to reach up, tongue sticking out in concentration, to discern leaf from hair in Linhardt’s head, and the focused look in his face is too adorable for Linhardt not to stare at. Caspar tackles Linhardt in a hug when they return. “You won it for us, Lin!” he yells. “I knew you had it in you! How’d you do it? Did you camouflage in the bushes like I said?”

Linhardt gently pushes Caspar off of him before he can suffocate to death. Byleth’s already slipping away to join his father, Jeralt, who frowns at the mud on Byleth’s hair. At Jeralt’s other side is a girl who looks like she might be Byleth’s twin sister. “I made… great use of my resources, yes,” Linhardt says, casting Ashe a glance. Ashe colors, the red standing out against his pale hair, and hurriedly looks away.

“What kinda answer is that? Ooh, I know. Does it have anything to do with that Byleth dude? Claude said you were with him or something.”

“We…” Linhardt hides a frown. It’s not like it would hurt to tell Caspar about what they did together, and it also isn’t as if Byleth had made him promise not to talk about the lake, but at the same time… for some reason, he _does_ want to keep it to himself. Something only he and Byleth know about… the thought is strangely thrilling, despite there being no real secret to be hidden in that. “We just happened to bump into each other.”

Caspar grins toothily. “Really? Oh, well, it doesn’t matter as long as we won. We get whatever we want for dinner tonight!”

“Oh?” Linhardt taps his chin in thought. “That’s convenient. Today I’m craving fish.”

As promised, Linhardt leaves Byleth’s mysterious secret room alone, though he still hears the very faint echo of the metallic _clang_ s every now and then when he’s staying up late at night to read with Caspar’s flashlight. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the noises, so Linhardt deduces Byleth must only be going to that room whenever he has the time or chance to sneak in it. This really only makes Linhardt _more_ curious, and the itch to learn more is near-impossible to ignore, but somehow he manages.

Byleth even starts coming down to join them in the dining hall sometimes—he usually stays with Claude at the table of the yellow team, and he always seems too shy, endearingly enough, to meet Linhardt’s eyes. His twin sister— _also_ named Byleth, for some inexplicable reason Linhardt is too intimidated to ask Jeralt about—is apparently a bit more sociable and is friends with all the girls, even sleeping with them in their dorms, though Linhardt heard it’s mostly because Dorothea is adamant on integrating Byleth into their social circle, despite Bernadetta’s constant frantic hiding away from her.

But every afternoon or so, when Linhardt is curled up in an armchair in the general assembly room and burying his nose in a book while the others sweat themselves to death running around outside, Byleth peeks in and joins him on the chair’s armrest. “It’s not fair if you’re the only one asking questions,” Byleth says, when Linhardt had asked for an embarrassing story.

“Well, go ahead and ask me something, then.”

“Oh. Um…” Byleth’s face screws up in concentration. “When’s your birthday?”

“November 7. When’s yours?”

“September 20. So I’m a few months older after all.” Byleth frowns. “This isn’t really… important information, though. Both these dates are too far away for either of us to do anything about it…”

Linhardt snorts. “Nonsense. I’ll send you a text on your birthday or something. Maybe a cute cat sticker, if I feel like it.”

Byleth tilts his head. “You don’t have my number.”

“I know. What are you waiting for?”

The campers aren’t allowed to bring their phones around with them during the day, so Byleth grabs a pen and scribbles the numbers on Linhardt’s palm, which Linhardt thinks might be the worst form of hand-holding he’s experienced yet. Never mind the fact that he’d never held hands with anyone, ever, until then—he knows enough to be aware that it’s certainly not the sort of hand-holding he reads in books. It makes Linhardt’s heart bounce around in his chest like a wild animal all the same.

Later that night, the ink has faded enough that Linhardt has to try several different variations—it doesn’t help that Byleth’s handwriting is atrocious in the first place—and he winds up texting cat stickers to a fast food place, a 70-year-old man, and a prostitute before he finally gets the right one. _Thx_ is all Byleth sends in response.

 _thx?_ Linhardt furiously and sleepily writes back. _i went through a lot to get you this cat. the 70 y/o guy is still texting me. at least type the whole word out._

_Thanks very much._

Hardly an improvement, but Linhardt will take what he can get. _what are u doing tonight? up in that secret room again?_

_Im eating_

_………at 12 midnight?_

_Yea_

Linhardt only thinks about it for a second. _can i join?_

The answer is a short, succinct, and disgustingly adorable, _Yea :)_

It’s getting harder to sneak out of the dorms without anyone noticing, since as the days pass and they all get friendlier with one another, they all start staying up later to fool around and do stuff like play chicken, which Linhardt thinks is a very strange, roundabout, and in-denial way of confessing crushes to one another. Thankfully most of them are sound asleep by now, probably tired after all the exercise earlier today, and Linhardt makes it down the stairs to the dining hall as quickly and quietly as possible.

Despite the darkness, Byleth isn’t hard to find—Linhardt hesitates in front of the kitchen screen door at first, trying to make out his shape in the shadows, when a soft bluish light suddenly comes into view. “There you are,” Linhardt says, nudging the screen door open as soundlessly as a screen door can be nudged open.

Byleth blinks at him, his face lit up by the fridge light, then smiles. “You really came. Here, help me with these.”

“Hm? Where are we going? Not to the lake at this hour.”

Byleth shakes his head. “I know the woods well, but it’s still dangerous to go there at night—not as easy to tell one tree from the other. I sleep in one of the spare dorm rooms at the end of the hall, and it’ll be more comfortable on a bed there than on the floor here. Also,” he adds, tucking a Coke bottle under his arm, “there might be roaches here.”

That gets Linhardt moving faster than he thought he could ever move. He’s not much for arm strength, or strength in general, but Byleth is nice enough to only have him carry the lighter stuff: cereal bags, a half-dozen doughnuts, and—holy shit—a box of mixed fruit snacks that Linhardt has to keep himself from inhaling as soon as he lays eyes on it. There are some leftover pizza slices they don’t think twice about before plugging into the microwave to heat up, only to instantly regret it when the microwave _beeps_ absurdly loudly.

“No one would’ve heard that, right?” Linhardt asks, but Byleth’s already shoving the pizza slices in a container and gathering the rest of their stolen snacks up in his arms. “Uh. Byleth?”

“It’s _very_ audible near where Seteth stays,” Byleth hisses. “Come on, before he bans us from dinner for a week!”

It’s hard running up the stairs while carrying an armful of food _and_ trying not to laugh—by the time they finally reach the end of the hall and Byleth throws his room door open, Linhardt’s a panting, giggling mess. He slumps against the door, nearly dropping his beloved box of fruit snacks, while Byleth flops onto the bed nearest the doorway. “Last… Last year,” he gasps out, “I almost got caught. I had to hide in the gap between counters and run out while he looked in the fridge.”

“The gap between the counters? How did you _fit?_ ”

“I have no idea either.” Byleth’s smile is beyond adorable. “It’s lonely eating so much by myself, though. I’m glad you’re here.”

“O… Oh.” Linhardt blinks. He can feel his cheeks warming up, even though there really isn’t any reason for them to. Is there? It’s Byleth’s fault for sounding so nice and sincere and all sorts of things Linhardt isn’t used to. “Yeah, I… I’m glad I’m here too, I guess,” he ends up mumbling, incredibly tempted to hide his face behind the fruit snacks.

The dorm is small—apparently, it was built when the camp was first established, but it hasn’t been used in a few years after new dorms were built to accommodate the growing number of campers. “I used to share with my sister and Flayn,” Byleth says, as Linhardt settles on one of the beds with him, “but then they actually started, er. Making friends. So now they sleep in the girls’ dorm.”

Linhardt takes a bite of pizza. Food always tastes better when it’s hard-earned. “Why don’t you sleep in the boys’ dorm too, then?” he suggests, trying to keep his voice from trembling tellingly. “There’s a spare bed, I think. It’s not like you’d be out of place there.”

Byleth munches on a doughnut. “I… don’t do well around a lot of people,” he murmurs, at length.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a little… overwhelming.” Byleth frowns. “I don’t understand it. But I—it’s like I stop thinking right if there are too many people around. Especially strangers. Like… Like I have to keep coming up with the right things to say, which isn’t so hard when it’s only one or two people, but when there are so many others and so many words to think of…” He sighs, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I’m sorry. That probably doesn’t make sense.”

“I—no, no, it does.” Linhardt crosses his legs and sits up straight, frowning. “I… I get what you mean. Not exactly the same thing, but… when everything gets too much, right?” At Byleth’s curious nod, Linhardt takes another bite of his pizza slice and mulls his next words over while chewing. “For me, I… I tend to take a lot of interest in one thing and not care about anything else. But once I find something new, I’ll stop caring about the previous thing and focus entirely on the new one instead… it’s a little like being unable to focus on more than a few people at once, right?”

Byleth’s silent for a long few moments, and Linhardt immediately wonders if he’s already said something wrong when Byleth looks up at him from his doughnut box. “Yeah,” he says, voice so soft Linhardt almost doesn’t hear him. Then he ducks his head again, but Linhardt definitely catches the smile on his face all the same. “It is.”

They talk late into the night, and Linhardt finishes the entire box of fruit snacks, which he supposes will be a nasty surprise for whoever might have been planning to eat them. But eating so much so late at night—on a comfy bed, at that—has Linhardt growing sleepy all too quickly. “Would it be alright to stay here for a bit?” he asks, in between yawns. “Just a short nap… it’s already early morning anyway. Then I’ll sneak back in the dorms before the counselors wake us up.”

Byleth shrugs. “If you don’t mind sharing the bed.”

“Sharing the—” Linhardt nearly sits up too fast, but manages to hold himself back at the last minute and settles for making eye contact from where he’s lying down instead. “T-There are plenty of other beds here. I could—”

Byleth shakes his head. “They’re too dusty. We don’t really clean this place much, since it’s just me and I only use one bed. It’s fine, right? It’s big anyway.”

“Um… uh, right…” Linhardt glances at the other beds in the dorm room. Even from where he’s lying down, he can tell there’s a fine layer of dust atop most of them, and the sheets look like they haven’t been washed in ages. Who knows if bed bugs have taken up residence in there too? The very thought makes him shudder in disgust. “Yeah, alright. I… I guess it’s fine…”

Once Byleth turns the light off and shuffles next to Linhardt, food wrappers and other trash neatly shoved under the bed to worry about tomorrow, though, Linhardt can’t bring himself to really care or feel uncomfortable. Byleth is pleasantly warm, and when he mumbles a, “Goodnight, Linhardt,” it only further warms Linhardt up from the inside.

“G-Goodnight,” Linhardt mutters, mentally beating himself over the head for the stutter.

Byleth seems to take it a different manner, though. “Are you cold?” he asks, pulling the blanket further up to tuck under Linhardt’s chin. The action is so terribly tender that Linhardt feels ready to explode. “It does get cold on summer nights sometimes,” Byleth comments, apparently oblivious to what he’s doing. “If it’s still too much, just hug me or something.”

“ _Hug you?_ ” Linhardt squawks, but Byleth’s already closed his eyes and made himself comfortable. With a sigh, Linhardt inches closer and tucks his head to rest against Byleth’s shoulder, listening to his breathing and the faint beat of his heart.

He can’t remember the last time he’s slept with someone like this—if he’s _ever_ slept with someone like this. But it feels nice, to have someone solid and secure next to him, to share midnight snacks with and run out of kitchens with and talk about everything and nothing at once with. It’s not the same with Caspar, even though they’ve done all sorts of things together—with Byleth, there’s a sort of tenderness and gentleness laced in everything they do, every word they speak, and Linhardt has to hold back a shiver at the promise of more of that tender, gentle feeling.

It really isn’t that cold, but Linhardt drapes an arm over Byleth’s waist all the same and pulls him just a little bit closer.

“What…” Byleth blinks down at him. “What are you doing here?”

Linhardt kicks his feet, submerged in the water, and lies down on the grass. “Relaxing. What does it look like?” Getting the dirt out of his clothes is going to be a pain later, but right now he can’t bring himself to care—the cool night breeze feels wonderful paired with his warm clothes, and the lake water is nice on his sore feet.

Byleth flops down next to him. “Aren’t you supposed to be playing that game right now? Or is it already your bedtime?”

“Hmph. I don’t have a bedtime. Shouldn’t you know that?” Linhardt stretches his arms over his head. “And I’m tired. I found three yellow ones and I got to see Claude glare at me, so I’m done for the day.”

The counselors had intentionally saved this game for until early evening: the three teams were given time to hide a number of glowsticks (according to whatever primary color their team is, of course) throughout the woods, and then they have to hunt down the glowsticks of the other teams with only a flashlight to help navigate. True to his word, Linhardt’s secured three points for his team, and he’d gotten a look of Claude’s cute surprised face when he surrendered the yellow glowsticks to Yuri, so Linhardt will be quite satisfied no matter the outcome.

Byleth hums thoughtfully. “It’s still the beginning of the game. Did you go here right away?”

“Yes. My feet were tired.” Linhardt looks up at him. Byleth looks nice like this, the moonlight reflected off the lake surface sparkling in his eyes. “Didn’t you say we could go fishing next time we get the chance to sneak off here?”

Byleth immediately brightens. “You’re right. Hold on.” He scrambles to his feet and launches through the woods, so fast that he’s gone before Linhardt can even finish grinning to himself.

He’s back in a matter of minutes, which isn’t surprising—the fishing gear is probably stored somewhere relatively hidden but nearby. “I promised I’d get you something too, right?” Byleth says, retrieving some small object from a box. Linhardt peers at it curiously, shining his flashlight on it, but even after a few moments it doesn’t properly register in his head until Byleth says, “It’s a fishing float. Isn’t it cute?”

“O-Oh… so it is.” Linhardt takes the tiny thing in hand. It’s made to look like a small, rainbow-colored fish that sparkles no matter how or where the light strikes it—certainly something that would attract the attention of some fish, that’s for certain. “You’re giving this to me?”

Byleth nods. “You said you don’t like handling live bait. And even if you don’t fish, maybe you can use it as a keychain.”

Considering the twin red hooks on the underside of the fishing float, Linhardt has a hard time imagining this hanging off his school bag or something, and he wonders if he’ll get made fun for it in college. But he smiles anyway, because… well, Byleth’s right. It _is_ cute. “Thank you,” Linhardt mumbles, pressing it close to his chest.

“You do like it, right?” Byleth asks, suddenly shy.

“Yeah. Yes. I do.” Linhardt swallows. Now _he’s_ shy, too. Damn it, there isn’t even anything to be shy about right now, is there? “Uh—um, let’s go… fish or something.”

In the end, Byleth’s the only one who fishes anything up, as Linhardt doesn’t want to endanger his new fishing float and so just holds onto the fishing rod and lets the empty hook bob in the water. “I’m curious,” Byleth says, when they’ve settled back next to each other on the riverbank. “You don’t really seem like the type to willingly join a summer camp.”

Linhardt snorts. “I definitely am not.”

“Oh. So… why?”

“It was Caspar—you know him, right? Short, blue, loud. He’s the one who found out about this place and wanted to go in our last year before the cut-off age.” Linhardt props his chin up on his palm. He’s not sleepy, not with Byleth beside him, but he can feel himself growing relaxed again. “I didn’t want to at first, but then my father said he wanted me to get a headstart on university, and… well, I ended up blurting out that I already made plans to go to a summer camp.” He shrugs. “It seemed the most useful excuse at the time.”

Byleth looks amused. “You went for the lesser evil.”

“Yes,” Linhardt agrees, scowling. “I could have spent my last few months of freedom napping in air-conditioned libraries or something, and researching everything I want to before I get shipped off to college… but I’m here instead. Though,” he adds, glancing at Byleth next to him, “I… suppose my time here hasn’t been _too_ bad.”

“Really? I’m glad to hear it.” Byleth turns to look at him with the most adorable smile Linhardt has ever seen in his life, and Linhardt nearly panics hard enough to jump in the lake.

As it is, he settles for hurriedly averting his gaze and focusing extremely hard on a rock. “I-It’s not fair if I’m the only one talking about myself,” Linhardt grumbles. “What about you? Tell me something interesting. If I get bored, I might just head up to that room of yours.”

“Okay, okay, no need to go that far,” Byleth frets. “Um… what do you want to know?”

Linhardt thinks about it for only a second. “What do you want to be in the future?”

He has a feeling he already knows the answer, and so he’s hardly surprised when Byleth smiles and confidently says, “A botanist.”

“I see.”

Byleth droops. “What? So you already knew. Why bother asking?”

Linhardt shrugs. “I wanted to hear it.” He decides against mentioning that he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the glimmer in Byleth’s eyes whenever he points out unique plants or mentions a random fact about trees that Linhardt had certainly not asked for but will take anyway. “That sounds nice. Being able to be around plants all day.”

“You’d hate it,” Byleth says. “You get allergies the moment you step outside the building.”

“I’m trying to be supportive here. Do you always have to be so perceptive?”

Byleth huffs the softest of laughs under his breath. “What about you, Linhardt? What do you want to be?”

Linhardt lets the silence drag on, idly kicking his feet in the water, and thankfully Byleth doesn’t press, though he does look confused. They sit there for several long, quiet minutes, Byleth watching the lake surface and Linhardt staring down at the fishing float on his lap, the light sparkling off of the fish’s prismatic scales.

 _What do you want to be when you grow up?_ he remembers Mother asking him, once, her voice sweet as birdsong, her hands gentle in his hair. _You don’t need to know just now, but someday you will have to make a decision. Your father is that kind of man. He’s never patient for too long._

_Why did you marry him, Mother?_

“My mother died from sickness,” Linhardt finally says. Byleth doesn’t look surprised or apologetic, only turns to look at him with his typical blank gaze. “My father is a doctor. He owns a hospital, actually, wants me to take over when he’s dead too.”

Linhardt expects Byleth to say something now, a comment along the likes of, “Oh, so you must be studying medicine then,” but it’s still patient, companionable silence. Linhardt has no idea why Byleth just sitting there, looking at him, _listening_ to him, is making his eyes hotter than they should be. “I… I don’t want to,” Linhardt manages, his voice coming out just the tiniest bit choked. “I—I hate the sight of blood. I don’t like being a leader. How can he expect me to…”

He trails off—he doesn’t trust himself to keep from crying.

Byleth shifts closer until their shoulder and elbows and thighs are brushing, then lets the quiet hang over them a little longer. Finally, he asks, “Do you want me to say anything?”

Linhardt sniffs. “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“Okay.” Byleth nods. “One of the fish you can catch in this lake is the rainbow trout.”

“…What?”

“They get their name from their scales. The colors on their backs can vary from brown to olive to dark blue, but all rainbow trout have a pink band running the length of their body and a silver underside that fades to white, and there are small black spots on their back, fins, and tail.” Byleth reaches behind him, digging something out from his bag—a tattered old encyclopedia of, predictably, fish. He flips it open to a page with an illustration that looks remarkably similar to the fish he’s describing. “One of their lifestyle traits is that they instinctively swim back to the body of water they hatched in to lay their eggs there as well. That’s why this lake is always full of them.”

Linhardt lets this information process for a while, then finally manages, “Do they taste good?”

“Like salmon,” Byleth says, smiling. “My sister and dad and I catch some all the time for dinner. But unless we need the food, we just release them afterwards.”

Linhardt turns back to the water. “I can’t believe I told you my life story and you replied with the egg-laying habits of rainbow trout. I should push you into the lake.”

“Not if I push you in first,” Byleth responds, sounding completely serious.

Linhardt tosses his useless fishing rod behind him, which apparently shocks Byleth long enough to give Linhardt the chance to shove him into the lake—Byleth yelps and topples into the water, which is just deep enough to submerge him until his chest. Linhardt jumps away from Byleth trying to grab his ankle and probably drag him down with him like some water monster of old, and Linhardt figures he owes his newfound agility to all the camp games he’s been pushed into playing. “Got you,” Linhardt says, grinning down at a soaked Byleth sitting miserably in the lake.

Byleth shakes like a wet dog. “Unfair. I wasn’t ready.” He salvages his fishing rod, placing it ever so gently on the grass, and climbs out of the water with a pout. “I don’t even have any spare clothes… if I catch a cold, you’re paying for the medicine.”

“I’d gladly throw my inheritance away for you,” Linhardt says, rolling his eyes and trying to ignore how that sounds strangely more romantic than he’d intended. He steps closer, meaning to offer his hoodie for as long as the walk back to camp, but the words die in his throat when the light shines on Byleth just right.

The camp shirt isn’t thick. In this lighting, his clothes stick to his skin, leaving very little to the imagination. Linhardt’s gaze seems to move of its own accord, following the lines of Byleth’s muscles, the curve of his waist, the swell of his chest, before Linhardt somehow finally manages to look away and stare fixedly at a leaf on the ground. “P-P-Put this on,” he practically commands, handing over his hoodie with unnecessary vehemence.

From the corner of his eye, Linhardt can just barely see Byleth tilting his head in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“Put that on or you’ll actually get sick and I’ll actually have to buy you cold medicine,” Linhardt says, all in one breath. He shoves the hoodie into Byleth’s hands and refuses to look any further until Byleth stares at him, shrugs, and eventually changes out of his wet shirt. His pants are a lost cause too, but it’s not as if Linhardt’s wearing a camp shirt under his own jeans, so Byleth will just have to suffer.

“Thanks, by the way,” Linhardt grudgingly mutters, after Byleth’s packed up the fishing gear and they’re walking back to camp. “For listening. I haven’t really told anyone else about that.”

“It’s nothing. You learned something about rainbow trout too.”

Linhardt scoffs. “And I am going to apply what I have learned about their egg-laying habits _where?_ ”

Byleth tries to frown, but the corners of his lips keep twitching upwards. “You never know. It could come in useful someday.”

“Yeah, right, it…” Linhardt blinks—had something just passed by them? He turns in a slow circle, but his flashlight had run out of battery earlier, so all he has to see by is the moonlight and the weak glow of Byleth’s old cellphone model. “Did you see something just no—oh! There it is.”

“What?” Byleth follows where Linhardt points, but even as he squints, he shakes his head. “I don’t see it. Is it a raccoon or something? I don’t have the best eyesight.”

“Neither do I, but _I_ see it. They must be glowsticks,” Linhardt reasons, hurrying along the forest path. Byleth hesitates but keeps pace beside him, still looking bewildered. “I guess there are some leftover. Maybe I can scavenge some points even after the game…”

“Like a vulture,” Byleth mumbles. Linhardt smacks him for that, and Byleth whacks him with the long sleeve of his hoodie, and Linhardt retaliates by trying to kick the inside of Byleth’s knee, but he ends up tripping and getting mud all over himself, so he reluctantly admits defeat.

He doesn’t find the glowsticks, but they do finally return back to camp, where the three teams and the counselors are already gathered. “Sorry I’m late,” Linhardt says, not very apologetic. “I tried looking for the glowsticks left behind, but it looks like you hid it too well.”

Dimitri from the blue team gives him a confused look. “Left behind? No, they’re all accounted for, Linhardt.”

“I… huh?”

“The game ended, what, ten minutes ago? We were just waiting here for you again,” Claude says, before his gaze slides over to Byleth trying to sneak away from the group and towards Jeralt and his sister. “And it looks like you were with Byleth, _again._ Wait, is he wearing your hoodie? Is there something you’re not telling us here?”

But Linhardt can hardly bring himself to care about that right now—he turns around to look back out at the woods he had just left. He hadn’t imagined that, did he? He’d seen tiny flashing lights in there, and he’d obviously assumed they were glowsticks, or maybe beams of light from other campers’ flashlights. They couldn’t have been ghosts or spirits or anything like that, right? Because those don’t exist, do they?

 _I got lost really often before, late at night… tiny flashing lights, once._ Byleth’s crooked smile pops into Linhardt’s head, the memory unbidden. _Sounds like spirits, right?_

His rapidly-panicking thoughts are interrupted when Constance, out of the building for once, claps her hands. “Alright, now,” she declares. “As the winning blue team wishes, it shall be cheese for dinner tonight! Everyone in the dining hall now!”

“Cheese?” Caspar repeats. “Like, just cheese? Nothing else? Just pure cheese?”

Edelgard sighs. “I apologize on my brother’s behalf. He isn’t even supposed to eat cheese, but he’s taking advantage of our freedom and time away from our parents here to eat as much as he wants…”

“So _that’s_ why Dimitri has been so adamant about winning the games,” Dorothea remarks. “I thought it was suspicious. He doesn’t seem like the competitive type at all.”

“You have no idea. When we were nine, we once went to war over the TV remote.” Edelgard shakes her head. “I never saw my Charizard figurine again…”

After the promised cheesy dinner (cheesecakes, cheeseburgers, cheese rolls, four-cheese pizza, Linhardt is going to be sick), Yuri rattles off some reminders for the last few weeks of their stay. “And, of course, a fireworks show on our last night together,” he says, although he sounds far from excited about it. “Personally _I_ am hardly a fan of obnoxiously loud explosives—”

“Yuri,” Constance scolds.

“—but, whatever. If you’re like me, you’re allowed to stay inside the dorms, of course.” Yuri flips over to the next paper on his clipboard, then nods. “That’s all for today. Get some rest, you all. Do _not_ raid the kitchen for midnight snacks or else I will kick you out of there myself. Whoever stole my fruit snacks will rue the day they made that decision.”

Linhardt meets Byleth’s eyes from the camp staff’s table, and a warm thrill runs through his chest at the small, secret little smile they share.

Back up in the dorm room, Linhardt is just about ready to fall dead asleep—he can’t stop thinking about the flashing lights he’d seen, and he hopes he can just forget about it in the morning—but apparently, the rest of the boys aren’t so sleepy. In fact, as Linhardt dully observes from where he’s lying in his bed, they’ve never been this lively. Is it the cheese? Was the cheese spiked with something? Is that why Linhardt feels violently ill?

“Lin!” Caspar tugs at his ankle. “Come on, you’ve just been lying there. You weren’t even with us during the game a while ago!”

“Sure I was. In the woods.”

Linhardt can pick out Claude’s snort of disbelief anywhere. “Yeah, with _Byleth._ You two have been getting _awfully_ close, you know.”

That gets Linhardt to sit up, more out of spite than anything, though he does regret it when his head spins and stars explode in his vision. “Ah, yes,” he mutters, doing his hardest to pretend he’s alright, “like how you’ve been getting _awfully_ close with Dimitri?”

Claude’s laugh comes out strained. “I have _no_ idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t?” Dimitri says, sounding hurt. He’s sharing a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn with his best friend Dedue, and Linhardt has to try his hardest not to throw up at the sight of _yet more cheese._

Linhardt makes to lie back down, feeling rather smug, but Caspar isn’t so easily distracted. “Aww, come on, Lin! I think everyone’s noticed you two look like pretty good friends.”

“We already know about Ferdinand and Hubert,” Ashe adds in an undertone. “It doesn’t get more embarrassing than the two of them.” ‘The two of them’ in question had snuck out, not to do embarrassing couple-stuff, but to play chess with Edelgard. Linhardt will never understand them.

Now most of their other roommates are staring at him curiously, with the exception of Ignatz drawing on his sketchbook and a few others. Linhardt has to dig his nails into his palms to keep from squirming under the attention, but it’s not like he can answer the unasked question anyway—it’s not like he really knows how he feels about Byleth. It might just be friendship, but it might also be… attraction.

“What does it matter?” he eventually mumbles, looking away. “Even if I do… you know, it’s not like I’ll ever see him again in a few weeks.”

The dorm practically explodes. “Don’t _say_ that!” Ashe cries, sounding physically injured.

“Yeah, you’ve got each other’s numbers!” Caspar points out. “You text, like, _every_ night! And it’s not like you live on other sides of the world!”

Even Dimitri nods atop his top bunk. “I think you two are very romantic,” he says, voice wobbling like he’s close to tears.

“Uh… thanks,” Linhardt says, mostly in reply to Dimitri, because he doesn’t want to acknowledge the other two. He _supposes_ they’re right, that leaving the summer camp doesn’t automatically mean goodbye, but…

Linhardt turns to look at the fishing float sitting on his bedside dresser. Byleth had helped him remove the hooks since it was clear Linhardt wasn’t going to be using it for its intended purpose anytime soon, so now it looks like a small, colorful fish keychain that might have been bought from the discount rack of a souvenir store. Claude follows his gaze and lets out a _huh_ of interest. “Is that from him too? He even got you a gift.”

“What about it?”

“ _What about it?_ He likes you, Linhardt.” Claude crosses his arms. “I’ve been going to this camp for the past, what, three years? And I’ve gotten to know Byleth more than most. He doesn’t give gifts so easily. He definitely doesn’t spend time with others the way he does with you.”

“I…” Linhardt sighs, flopping back down onto his pillow. “I don’t know. I guess.”

Thankfully they don’t push it, instead going back to talking among one another—Linhardt buries his face in his pillow, but even as he closes his eyes, he can still see the fishing float in his mind.

No—more than that, he can see a room door, hiding some sort of terrible secret behind it. He can see Byleth cornering him against the wall, pinning his wrists above his head as the lightning and thunder flashed outside the window, illuminating his face and the stunned expression he wore. Byleth hiding in the bushes with him and picking twigs out of his hair, Byleth toppling down the pitfall trap with him in the woods, Byleth writing his number on Linhardt’s palm, Byleth with armfuls of food running away from the kitchen. Byleth, Byleth, Byleth.

Linhardt tries to shut the memories out, but it’s hard when he realizes just how much time he’s spent with Byleth throughout the past few months. Has it even really been that long? It feels like only yesterday Caspar had run up to him chattering on about a super-cool summer camp he had found online and how Linhardt should totally go make some everlasting memories with him before they go to different colleges.

Time has always been something of an enemy—merciless, unstoppable, selfish. It took what it wanted and didn’t bother paying attention to anything else. When Mother had died, Father had barely grieved—he took a day off for the funeral, then went right back to his responsibilities at the hospital. _Did Mother mean nothing to you?_ Linhardt wanted to ask—still wants to ask. _She loved you so much. What about you? Do you even think of her anymore? Or do you like having the house all to yourself now?_

He thinks about the garden outside their house, brown and withered, all alone. Mother would have cried at the sight of them. Linhardt wonders what Byleth would say if he saw that garden, if he would tell Linhardt off for neglecting the plants or if he would say it isn’t his fault. Or if he would say nothing at all, just pick up a watering can and get to work.

Linhardt doesn’t get much sleep that night.

On the day before they have to leave, Linhardt pauses in the middle of packing his things and fishes out his phone. He doesn’t know how many cat stickers he sends until Byleth finally responds: _Are you going to the fireworks tonight?_

_why?_

_Theyre best viewed from the lake_

_of course its the lake. its always the lake with you._

_So… meet you there?_

Linhardt mulls over it for a second, but he only sends another cat sticker in response. Byleth sends a smiley face back, which is equally vague and not much of a response at all, so why can’t Linhardt keep his own stupid smile off his face?

Honestly, the fireworks are too loud for Linhardt to stand anyway, but they’re easier to handle from a respectable distance. That night, he gets Caspar to cover for him if anyone asks, though he’s fairly sure either no one will care or everyone will assume he’s with Byleth again, and takes the now-familiar path through the woods and towards the lake.

Byleth is already waiting when he gets there, watching a lone fish swim languidly through the water. They make eye contact through their reflections on the lake surface, and Byleth stands with a smile. “Linhardt,” he says, cocking his head in greeting. “You actually came.”

“What do you take me for? Of course I did.” And if Linhardt had applied the tiniest dash of lip gloss and the subtlest bit of (Dorothea’s) eyeliner, that’s nobody’s business but his.

“I don’t know. The cat sticker was a little… vague.”

“So was your smiley face.”

“So was my smiley face,” Byleth agrees. “Um… before the fireworks start, how did you like your stay here? I know you said you didn’t even really want to go to summer camp… or at least you only wanted to go for all the wrong reasons… but, uh. Er.” He scratches his cheek. “Was it at least okay for you? If you could, would you come back next year?”

Linhardt leans back on one leg. “I can’t believe you invited me out to this very secret, very private spot, and the first thing you do is ask me for a review. I’ll give you one star just for that.”

“Wait, no!” Byleth protests, but his eyes are crinkling at the edges at the promise of a laugh. “I—It’s not really a review.”

“So why does it sound exactly like one?”

“It’s not a review for the camp,” Byleth rectifies. He fumbles with his hands a moment, as if unsure what to do with them, before shoving them in his jeans pockets. “It’s a review for me.”

Linhardt gives him a long, hard look. “Are you asking me if I would come back to you next year?”

The fireworks choose that moment to begin, lighting up the night sky in a myriad of flashing colors that are nearly blinding against the darkness. Byleth startles at the sound, thankfully muted considering the distance, and looks up without answering Linhardt’s question first—not that Linhardt can blame him, because he nearly forgets what he’d even asked when he looks at Byleth’s eyes and sees the lights reflected in that shade of ocean-blue.

“They’re nice, huh,” Byleth mumbles. “I don’t really like the fireworks usually, but they feel better with you somehow.”

Linhardt steps forward, though his legs threaten to give way if he moves any further. “Byleth,” he says, slowly, trying to inject as much meaning in his voice as possible. “Is there a reason you asked me out here?”

“I wanted to,” Byleth says, but it’s a deflection at best. He averts his gaze from Linhardt, scuffing his shoes on the grass. “You didn’t answer my question first,” he adds, as if already expecting Linhardt to press him for a proper response.

“I—fine. Yes.” Linhardt swallows, feeling like he accidentally chokes up his rapidly-beating heart in the process. “I would. Come back here, that is. Come back to you. If I could.”

“Can’t you?”

“I-I don’t know.” Linhardt looks down. “College is going to be… time-consuming. I’ll be dorming there, too.”

The boom of the fireworks is but white noise in his head now. Linhardt clenches his fists, digs his nails into his palms again just to feel something through the numbness beginning to spread throughout his body. It’s always like this, isn’t it? He meets someone, he gets attached, and then what? Mother died, and Father was a different person from the idealized version of him in Linhardt’s head. And now Byleth is here, standing with him at the lake under the fireworks, perhaps for the last time.

Linhardt stares down at the grass, feeling warmth beginning to claw at his eyes. He hadn’t actively tried to socialize and make friends, but it had happened anyway. Dorothea painted his nails just the other day. Hubert was appalled at his distaste for coffee while Ferdinand lauded him for his preference for tea. Edelgard scolded him for not waking up on time but let him sleep in all the same. Even Claude and Dimitri know his favorite foods now, would give him an extra sweet bun if they had it for dessert. Somewhere along the way he’d found himself _enjoying_ his time here. But what does it matter? They’re all leaving, all going to go their separate ways, and he would likely never see them again. There was no reason their paths would ever have to cross after tomorrow.

“I’m not good with relationships,” Linhardt blurts out, hoping he hasn’t read this whole thing wrong. Byleth isn’t saying anything, just staring at him, listening in that terribly attentive way of his that always makes Linhardt tell him more than he intends. “And you know me. I’m lazy and unmotivated, and uncaring, and insensitive, and… and…”

“And nice,” Byleth says, when Linhardt struggles for words. He steps closer, brushing their hands together, the light of the fireworks dancing along his dark blue hair. “Understanding. Witty. Ambitious. I like how you always want to learn. I—” His voice falters, hesitates, before a faint blush colors his cheeks. “I think you’re… pretty… too.”

Linhardt’s head is spinning, both from being called _pretty_ and from the realization that Byleth hadn’t said anything about how little time they have left. Does it not matter to him? Does he only like Linhardt now, with the veneer of summer romance around them, and after tomorrow he’ll simply drop Linhardt and forget him for as long as it takes Linhardt to get on the bus back to the estate, just like how Linhardt picks interests up and drops them just as quickly?

 _Or maybe,_ Linhardt thinks, as Byleth’s hand slowly, shyly moves to intertwine their fingers together, _he knows this isn’t forever, and doesn’t care._

“I’m not good with relationships either,” Byleth murmurs. “You already know everything about me. I don’t know how to talk to others. I don’t really understand a lot of… normal stuff. I like fish too much. Stuff like that. But, um… you spent time with me anyway. And even if we don’t have a lot of it left… I’m still glad. For what we had.”

Linhardt scowls. “Have.”

“I—what?”

“For what we have,” Linhardt says, and kisses him.

This is not Linhardt’s first kiss, because he has been unwittingly dragged into one too many games of spin-the-bottle, but this is definitely the first one where his heart feels ready to explode out of his chest like a piñata that has officially had enough. He’d grabbed Byleth by the collar of his shirt to pull him closer, which had seemed like a very good idea two seconds ago, but now the action just feels awkward and what if Byleth didn’t even _want_ to kiss? Now Linhardt’s heart is thundering for a different reason entirely—

Byleth tilts his head, one hand resting on Linhardt’s waist and the other at the back of his head, and suddenly every concern Linhardt just had disappears in a single breath.

Linhardt doesn’t think either of them are any good at kissing, amidst the nose-bumping and forehead-touching, but it hardly matters when all Linhardt can think about is the press of their bodies together, the hand tangling in his hair, Byleth’s warm breath on his skin when they separate briefly. “I like you,” Byleth says, eyes glimmering with the light of the fireworks. “I like you a… a lot, Linhardt.”

“Yes,” Linhardt says, just a little bit dazed, “I gathered that much.”

“Won’t you say it back?”

Linhardt swallows. “I like you,” he whispers, feeling suddenly far too vulnerable for this. “I like you too. I… I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you.” _I want to come back here someday. I want to keep coming back here. I don’t want to have to come back. I want to stay. I want to stay, I want to stay, I want you to stay._

He doesn’t realize he’d said almost all of that out loud until Byleth kisses him again, hard and insistent and just the slightest bit desperate, enough to leave Linhardt wonderfully breathless when they pull apart. “I’ll find you again,” Byleth promises, resting their foreheads together. “I’ll visit you in campus and bring you lunch or nap with you or—or anything. Anything, as long as you don’t forget me.”

The thought is ludicrous. “Forget you?” Linhardt repeats. “Are you ridiculous? How could I?” How could he forget the delightful way his heart bounced up to his throat whenever he met Byleth’s eyes, or how his hands itched to touch Byleth’s skin in a way Linhardt had never been so familiar with until he’d met the other man? How could he ever _possibly_ forget this moment, here and now, the wind blowing in their hair, the lake water sparkling and bubbling, the entire color spectrum playing out in Byleth’s eyes reflecting the fireworks above them?

Byleth nods once, slowly, never breaking eye contact. He doesn’t seem capable of speaking, only leaning in to press another chaste kiss to the corner of Linhardt’s mouth before drawing back. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“What is it? Another lake?”

Byleth shakes his head, a smile playing on his lips. “That would be nice, but no. Follow me. I’d rather no one see us heading back.”

 _Probably because they’d assume we’d be heading to your room,_ Linhardt thinks to himself. The thought excites him more than it should, and he has to count back from one-hundred to calm down—knowing Byleth, that’s probably the last thing on his mind right now.

Byleth leads him through a path in the woods that winds back to the camp building, thankfully without crossing anyone else on the way. It’s only when they climb the stairs up to the third floor that Linhardt realizes what this must be about. “Will you finally—”

“Shh,” Byleth hushes, but he’s still smiling, and Linhardt can barely contain himself.

At long last, they’re standing back outside the door that has taunted Linhardt so with its secrets—Byleth fishes a key out of his pocket, scans the corridor for almost a full minute, then finally unlocks the door. He holds his index finger up to his mouth, as if Linhardt needs another reminder to keep quiet (he does), and pushes the door open.

Linhardt had been expecting something appropriately impressive. For example, perhaps it would be an indoor garden Byleth has been cultivating for some time, enough that trees have overtaken the room and there is an actual pond in the center, or maybe a waterfall. Or, based on the metallic _clangs_ he had heard from here the first time around, perhaps it’s some sort of machine that could upend the world’s technology as they know it, like a time-traveling device similar to that one TV show Linhardt has been binge-watching every night on his phone. _Or_ it could be something else entirely, different but just as awesome and liable to have Linhardt swooning into Byleth’s arms from overwhelming shock.

As it is, he gets a cage.

This explains the clanging somewhat, but all it does is send Linhardt’s heart rocketing up into his throat at the memory of Hapi’s horror story all those months ago, about the old man locked in a cage. Is Byleth secretly an executioner? Is he some sort of closet sadist, taking entertainment from locking people up and inflicting all sorts of torturous pain upon them? It doesn’t seem like him at all, and Linhardt honestly doubts it, but the world is full of surprises. Maybe, Linhardt theorizes with a thunderclap of realization, Byleth charms a different camper every summer to be his victim for the rest of the year and Linhardt’s been selected as his new prisoner.

As it is, he gets a cat.

“A… A cat?” Linhardt’s voice cracks. “Byleth, what is that?”

“You just said it yourself. She’s a cat.” Byleth steps forward, unlocks the cage with a very familiar _clang,_ and lets the small cat scamper out to nuzzle his ankle. The disgustingly adorable sight snaps Linhardt out of his confused thoughts. “You know how this place is strictly no-pets, right? Both because it’s not really equipped for animals in general, and because Yuri has awful allergies.”

Linhardt manages a stiff nod. “But… a cat. A cat?”

“She was just a kitten when I found her,” Byleth says, crouching down to pet the cat. He looks up at Linhardt with a small pout. “I think she got separated from her mother, but even after searching the entire forest I couldn’t find any other cats… and I couldn’t just leave her there! So… here she is. This is a storage room no one really uses, and it’s old enough that the new master key doesn’t open it, so I hid her here.”

Linhardt tends to start sneezing around animals too, especially the ones with long fur, but he figures a few minutes shouldn’t be so bad. He kneels down, letting the cat sniff him before it meows and rubs against his leg. “Cute,” he mumbles. “But a little… hm.”

“A-A little what?”

“I thought it was going to be a much bigger secret than this,” Linhardt says, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “But it’s just a cat after all. Seriously, if I had seen this from the very start, do you really think I would have gone around shouting this secret to everyone?”

Byleth colors. “I… W-Well, I couldn’t take any risks. If anyone found out, they’d probably send her to a shelter or something, and you _know_ what they do to animals that don’t get adopted there. So. Yeah.” He scratches his cheek. “I’m only telling you now because I trust you.”

“And because it’s my last day here,” Linhardt points out. “So there’s very little real danger.”

“Mostly because I trust you,” Byleth insists. He inches forward, kissing Linhardt again with absolutely zero warning whatsoever—Linhardt is not exactly proud of the muffled noise he makes, nor the way he immediately melts into the kiss once he realizes what’s going on. “You promise, right?” Byleth says, drawing away just enough to speak. “That you’ll come back someday.”

Somehow Linhardt knows he’s not talking about the camp. “I’ll ditch classes if I have to,” Linhardt promises. “As long as _you_ uphold your end of the promise. I so very am already looking forward to those lunches you mentioned.”

Byleth’s only response is to grin and kiss him once more, and then many times after that.

This may not last forever, Linhardt knows. Relationships, especially those involving him, rarely do. Maybe their problems will catch up to them and get in the way of their time together, or they’ll find out they don’t mesh as well as they thought they did, or the long-distance of it all will push either of them into pursuing a different person. Time has never been on Linhardt’s side, and he doubts it’s on Byleth’s either.

But right now they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re _together,_ tucked away in this little summery corner of the world, with a cat between them and the fireworks still showering the night sky with the colors of the rainbow, and Linhardt can’t ask for anything more.

**Author's Note:**

> \- i have clearly never been to summer camp before because i, like linhardt, am physically incapable of moving too much, so i modeled this after the catholic retreat house i went to earlier this year! it's not the same but it's the closest i could get to it. the surrounding woods are also rumored to have our country's equivalent of nature spirits, though significantly more malevolent than the ones described in this fic lol  
> \- linhardt getting lost at night (without his phone) and needing to be found was a reference to something similar that happened to one of my classmates during our retreat there, & ashe saying his older brother/christophe only remembering the long, window-less corridor is a reference to my own older sister only remembering the same thing LOL. now if only i, too, met someone hot and fell in love with them there  
> \- hapi's "horror" story is exactly the same as the one my friends experienced, complete with the recurring dream and the random clanging noise at 2am despite there being no machinery or construction around. the difference is that the dreamer dreamed of an old lady instead of an old man, which i changed in this fic as a slight reference to TWSITD/solon/thales. another thing i didn't include was that a different friend also saw a dark, spindly shadow hovering above the dreamer's bed... 🤔  
> \- the two (2) games are #7 and #8 on [this list](https://www.momjunction.com/articles/camping-games-and-activities-for-teens_00399677/). i had plans for a water balloon fight, a field trip, and them gardening, but i got lazy and this was already Really long lmao  
> \- the [fishing float](https://www.dunlopfishing.com/uploads/images/Gallery/Fishing-Lures/editor_54c659354f0595508920de28bcfcd8cc_0ac345.jpeg) byleth gives linny (linny takes to clipping it onto the belt hoops of his jeans. not much of a fashion statement but they make him happy and that's what matters)  
> \- rainbow trout facts from [here](https://forum.americanexpedition.us/rainbow-trout-information-facts-photos-and-artwork)  
> \- the time-travel TV show linhardt briefly mentions near the end is a german series titled [dark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_\(TV_series\)) (available on netflix). i am not sure if i would recommend it but with how much thinking it requires its viewers to do i think it's the sort of show linhardt would like  
> \- cashepar eventually go up to the roofdeck together and kiss
> 
> thank you for reading (❁´◡`❁) if you liked this, check out [this tweet](https://twitter.com/featherxs/status/1239788477807349760)!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/featherxs)   
>  [tumblr](http://featherxs.tumblr.com/)


End file.
